…give or take.
Last week Facebook was been taken over with a new challenge: “How hard did aging hit you?” The initial goal was to post your first profile picture on Facebook along side your most recent. In theory, it should show off how much you’ve changed, like a high school reunion, it’s a ‘looks’ contest. In reality, 10 years isn’t enough time to drastically change a person who is already in adulthood. What’s really changed: our technology.
Forget looking for wrinkles or grey hair, look at those PIXELS, the artifacts hanging out like round ghosts on your 10-year-old photos. Look at the lighting, the resolution! Look how far we have come – and where we went!
Can you imagine a world where you ordered a hot meal and upon it’s appearance at your table rather than digging in, you reach into a backpack for a bulky camera, snap a few artful shots, trundled out a laptop and USB cable, asked the waitstaff for an Ethernet cable, and then posted your (now tepid) meal to MySpace?
Rather than look at changes to our faces, look at changes in what we share- and why. Today’s social media landscape is a rose colored presentation of our best life. Every photo has been touched, at least a little, we’ve become masters of cropping, and tagging, of branding ourselves as lively, fun individuals – forgetting that we are all actors on this stage.